Can Theatre Change People's Minds? To Wallace Shawn, That's Not Inconceivable

Stage and screen legend Wallace Shawn sums up his newest play thusly: “Most people have this dream of finding someone they love, finding a partner. Even for priests, monks, nuns, the Pope, it's an issue. They may want a partner, but the rules say they're not allowed to have one. But the topic would be. . . well, I don't think the Pope would be bored by my play.”

Sure, some eccentric theatre enthusiasts have critiqued the seeming lack of action in Shawn’s plays. But one would be hard-pressed to argue they are uneventful. No, in a Wallace Shawn play, one can expect showers of bullets raining down on a garden party (The Designated Mourner) or a seductive white cat leading one into a disturbing and erotic world (Grasses of a Thousand Colors). Shawn’s style is as arresting as it is confrontational. His plays (typically with small casts of which he is a part) are memory plays, testimonies, or sick or deathbed confessions—told in direct address to audiences in monologue. All his works wrestle with human motivation, how and why we justify cruelty, the threat of the ever-rising right, the short-sighted elitism of the left, and what to do with yourself, and your relationship to suffering, if you happen to be born bourgeoise.

Shawn, son of longtime New Yorker editor William Shawn and journalist Cecille Lyon, supported himself in his youth by “borrowing and other clever techniques,” in addition to working as a shipping clerk and as a schoolteacher. Though he is known principally as a playwright to this reporter, the idea of “writing for money” never occurred to him.

When he was 35, Shawn realized people found him “funny as an actor,” and parlayed that into a steady career—shouting “inconceivable” as Vizzini in The Princess Bride, prompting Cher’s “it does not say RSVP on the Statue of Liberty” as Mr. Hall in Clueless, and, most critically to Gen Z-ers and younger, voicing Rex in the Toy Story movies and video games. His acting work allowed him the luxury of writing only when he wanted to, taking years off between plays until inspiration struck once more. Shawn’s newest play, What We Did Before Our Moth Days, came as a surprise to him (he had decided he was “too old” to write another play). “And then,” Shawn says, “Somehow, I was doing it.”

What We Did Before Our Moth Days, running until May 10 at the Greenwich House Theatre, is a frank yet forgiving glimpse into the life (and afterlife) of a father, his son, his wife, and his mistress. Moth Days, which Shawn describes as “comically unlike most dramas about families,” grapples with the issue of people who fall in love with someone who is not their spouse. Inspired in part by the “shocking truth” that very few animals are completely monogamous (the other part by his father's decades-long affair with a female colleague), Shawn collaborates once more with director André Gregory (they have worked on three films together, starting with My Dinner with André).

Together, the longtime friends unravel the conundrum: What if our actions, in love and in life, are not completely within our control?

“The character Tim [the son, played by comedian John Early] makes the case that blaming people for what they do is a waste of time. It’s, in a way, foolish,” Shawn explains. “You might be looking at people as if they were molecules in a test tube, saying, ‘Well, when I put this batch of chemicals into this test tube with another batch of chemicals, what happens?’”

While as a dramatist, Shawn cites the Ancient Greek tradition of blaming man’s folly on meddlesome gods, he does believe the arts play a necessary role in instilling empathy and compelling people to action.

“It would be stupid not to feel that books, plays, films, along with conversations with friends, change people. Why else do people change?” Shawn says firmly. “When you look at, let's say, the people in Minneapolis who have risked their lives to protest ICE, why are they doing that? They’re doing it because they've reached certain conclusions, and they've been influenced to reach those conclusions by the books they've read and the films they've seen.”

Not lost on Shawn is the opportunity he has been given (by lead producers Scott Rudin and Barry Diller) to influence audience members in not one, but two of his plays. On Sundays and Mondays (also until May 10), Shawn is reprising his one-person show The Fever. Set in a nameless nation amid political upheaval, The Fever is the culmination of Shawn’s own midlife epiphany. In the “heavily autobiographical” play, the narrator (which, Shawn notes, could be played by anyone of any sex or gender as long as they are older than 25), falls ill on a trip to a foreign land and deliriously decries their own privilege, no longer blind to stark global inequality and their complicity in human suffering.

Together, Moth Days and The Fever come “pretty close” to completing the full picture of Shawn and his view of his life, which radically changed when he turned 40. Half his life ago, the 82-year-old playwright had a revelation about the equal and opposite reaction created by his upper-middle-class life: For all the comforts he enjoys, there is someone in squalor. And then, only after his eyes were opened, Shawn notes, he took a trip (and got sick). In a way, these two plays are each a cutting side of the double-edged sword he’s been sharpening for decades.

“If you were to say, ‘Well, what did Shawn write about?’” the playwright muses. “He was writing about the class into which he was born. What We Did Before Our Moth Days is a close-up picture of four bourgeois individuals. The Fever is from a distance. It's a [wide] shot. One is almost looking at the whole class of bourgeois people. The other is about, well, anybody who can [afford to] get a ticket to the play.”

And as Shawn contemplates what he hopes to give, what he hopes audiences might receive, and what might motivate audiences to go to the theatre in the first place, he invites those who do attend to have patience, with the works and with themselves. He’s making theatre for those whose attention spans have not fallen to short form (or those who would like to challenge their attention, as The Fever pushes two hours and Moth Days touches three). It's also for those who, like him, wake up “angry and upset,” asking themselves what they might do to “alleviate the horrors” published daily in the newspaper.

“The best thing I myself can think of to do is to perform this play,” Shawn says resolutely. “Maybe somebody will be struck by it, and that will somehow help to reverse the demonically evil trends that we see. I wake up wondering, ‘Is there anything I can do to help mitigate the harm that I, myself, am causing?’ Yeah, doing this play is a good thing.”